"I feel bad for the team," Wright said when asked about the troubled launch by GamesIndustry.biz following a lecture at the University of California Santa Cruz. "I could have predicted—I kind of did predict there'd be a big backlash about the DRM stuff. It's a good game; I enjoy playing it a lot... [but] that was basically inexcusable, that you charge somebody $60 for a game and they can't play it. I can understand the outrage. If I was a consumer buying the game and that happened to me, I'd feel the same."

Wright founded SimCity developer Maxis back in 1987 and left in 2009 to start an independent venture known as the Stupid Fun Club, so he had nothing to do with the development of the latest SimCity title. His comments go against the official line from Electronic Arts that SimCity's online requirements had nothing to do with DRM and everything to do with providing a persistent connection to the worldwide trading markets and regional interactions in the game (never mind that hackers have opened up the potential for offline play without much issue). "It's not [DRM]," EA Chief Operating Officer Peter Moore said last month. "People still want to argue about it. We can't be any clearer—it's not."

But Wright seem a bit nonplussed by the argument that a persistent online connection was absolutely necessary to support gameplay in a game like SimCity. "I think people care if it doesn't work," he said. "If you can't play it on planes, stuff like that... I think there are some very valid concerns about it. Also there's a perception; I don't expect to play World of Warcraft on the airplane, because my perception is it has to be on the 'Net. SimCity was in this very uncomfortable space, like the uncanny valley, almost; [it was caught] between 'was it a single-player game or was it a multiplayer game?'"

Despite the server issues, Wright doesn't seem ready to jump on the always fashionable "let's bash EA for absolutely everything" bandwagon. "It was kind of like, 'EA is the evil empire;' there was a lot of 'Let's bash EA over it,'" he said. "It's hard to talk about EA as this monolithic thing with one agenda. If you move back, it's like all these different studios going in slightly different directions; it's almost more like a loose federation. It is going through a lot of restructuring right now, but I don't even have the time to tune into it."

Promoted Comments

sadness is a headline that assumes nobody knows who Wil Wright is anymore ;(

10 posts | registered Jan 21, 2013

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl